Dr. Jay Giedd is a forty-year old scientist who works for the National Institute of Health (NHI). He is one of a small group of scientists who have recently discovered that the brains of regular teenagers are far more different than anyone could have imagined. As a child psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and the father of four kids himself, Giedd has dedicated his career to finding out what really is going on in the adolescent brain. Dr. Giedd explains that scientist always have been fascinated and interested by teen behavior, but that they haven’t had the tools and technology to actually do research on it. But today, they do. So called imagine machines can scan the brain and tell us what the brain looks like and how it is developing. On Tuesdays it is brain scanning nights on the National Institute of Health. Children and teens from the ages of thirteen to twenty five come to the Dr. Giedd to lie, or sometimes ever sleep in the long, noisy magnets. Giedd has been putting kinds’ heads in this machine for ten years, scanning and rescanning the brains of hundreds of teens. It’s the worlds first such long-term study of brain development in normal kids which has produced extraordinary results, the ripples of which extend far beyond any individual teenager and any individual brain and- for parents and neuroscientists alike- are likely to change the way we think about teenagers forever. Giedd has now detected continued growth in a number of key areas of the teenager’s cerebral cortex, including the parietal lobes, which are associated with logic and spatial reasoning, and the temporal areas, which are linked to language. And perhaps most important, he discovered complex, ongoing growth in the frontal lobes, the are right behind our foreheads, the brain’s so-called policeman of chief executive, that helps us plan ahead, resist impulses, in essence be grown-up. He also found that the very area that helps make teenagers do the right thing, are one of the last areas of the brain to reach a stable grown-up state, perhaps not reaching full development and refinement until well past age twenty! Watch this video to find out more…
Dr. Jay Giedd is a forty-year old scientist who works for the National Institute of Health (NHI). He is one of a small group of scientists who have recently discovered that the brains of regular teenagers are far more different than anyone could have imagined. As a child psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and the father of four kids himself, Giedd has dedicated his career to finding out what really is going on in the adolescent brain.
Dr. Giedd explains that scientist always have been fascinated and interested by teen behavior, but that they haven’t had the tools and technology to actually do research on it. But today, they do. So called imagine machines can scan the brain and tell us what the brain looks like and how it is developing. On Tuesdays it is brain scanning nights on the National Institute of Health. Children and teens from the ages of thirteen to twenty five come to the Dr. Giedd to lie, or sometimes ever sleep in the long, noisy magnets. Giedd has been putting kinds’ heads in this machine for ten years, scanning and rescanning the brains of hundreds of teens. It’s the worlds first such long-term study of brain development in normal kids which has produced extraordinary results, the ripples of which extend far beyond any individual teenager and any individual brain and- for parents and neuroscientists alike- are likely to change the way we think about teenagers forever.
Giedd has now detected continued growth in a number of key areas of the teenager’s cerebral cortex, including the parietal lobes, which are associated with logic and spatial reasoning, and the temporal areas, which are linked to language. And perhaps most important, he discovered complex, ongoing growth in the frontal lobes, the are right behind our foreheads, the brain’s so-called policeman of chief executive, that helps us plan ahead, resist impulses, in essence be grown-up. He also found that the very area that helps make teenagers do the right thing, are one of the last areas of the brain to reach a stable grown-up state, perhaps not reaching full development and refinement until well past age twenty!
Watch this video to find out more…